Imagine finishing a video game like Mass Effect and then having a personalized comic book generated featuring the decisions and tactics you used while playing. Apple has already imagined it, and they've got the patent application to prove it.
Apple Insider directs us to U.S. Patent Application number 20100203970, titled "Automatically Generating a Book Describing a User's Videogame Performance." Filed by Apple in February of last year, the patent application outlines a method for taking your experiences in a video game, from the way you dispatch your enemies to the amount of time you spend working on a particular puzzle, and uses that data to generate a comic book, eBook, or regular old book, filled with your personal gameplay experience.
The system could take screenshots during key points in the game, integrating them into the finished work as illustrations, incorporating pregenerated text and images where applicable.
Once the game is finished and the book has been generated, Apple lays out several plans for distributing the work, sending an eBook to a device, directly to the user, or using a service to print physical copies of the book, sending them to the user and friends.
The patent application isn't limited to Apple devices either. Consoles from all three manufacturers are mentioned, along with various handheld devices. It's the sort of system that a developer could integrate into its games, possibly using an Apple service to handle final product generation and distribution.
Feel free to check out the link below if you'd like to get into the technical details and specifics of the patent application.
I read a lot of video game-related comic books, and the experience generally leaves me slightly empty inside. While concepts from the games represented shine through, my experience does not. My personal adventure is an echo of whatever story the comic book writer chooses to focus on.
To have my personal experience preserved in physical form would be amazing. Imagine how fulfilling it would be to have a stack of comic books sitting near your entertainment center, a physical chronicle of your time spent gaming. All of those 'remember when' moments, set to paper, ready to be shared with whoever might care.
I think Apple is really onto something here.
Automatically Generating A Book Describing a User's Videogame Performance [U.S. Patent Office via Apple Insider]